Hello. I have searched for answers and to be honest i so new to Linux that i am completely lost. If anyone can assist me with trying to get CentOS 4.1 to work with RAID0 using the ICH7 RAID (fakeraid or software raid) used on the Intel D945GTP motherboard, i would be most grateful.

I have it configured the SATA in the BIOS as RAID and have used the utility to setup a RAID0 array, but CentOS does not recognize the volume and shows me each individual drive. I have 2 x 200GB SATA i'd like to use in RAID0.

Please, if anyone can give me instructions i would appreciate it.

Thank you.

If you just want software raid, then you don't want to set the raid up in the BIOS. Disable the RAID settings in the BIOS, and setup your RAID using the CentOS installation.

I want the RAID to be transparent to the OS so i can recover quickly from a drive failure. If i use software raid, i cannot mirror my boot partition...

The onboard RAID is supported in the 2.6 kernel with libata but i cannot get it to see the logical RAID volume. The volume is setup, but CentOS only see's each individual drive. Seems like i need to supply a driver or something.

Kernel re-compile? i'm really not sure about how to go about this.

I found the following really useful resource: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

If anyone can tell me what i need to do i would be most grateful. Others have it working.

Thanks very much!

Bump for this topic.

I would also like to know the answer. I have configured a RAID 5 volume using 4 SATA-II hard drives and am trying to make CentOS install into it, but it insists to use the 4 separate drives.

Please let us know if there is a way to change this.

Thanks,
Tom

I have similar problem with Silicon Image 3112 and 3114 RAID card too. I have created the mirror set in RAID card bios but when I boot up to install. It just shows the seperated disk instead of the RAID disk. I found that the start up program cannot load the raid drive. I have to force it to load by insert the floppy disc and manual load it . But the system just said that it cannot find it ..
I have downloaded the most updated driver from silicon image website and bios too but it won't help.

Ken

i have the same problem, with my ich6 raid (fakeraid), the only way to doit works, it with dmraid but it not stable to, and no big distros that have soport for it, and no exist an install to doit easy when you install the system, so the only way is installing the system in one disk, install dmraid , configure it and ready, but if have an update of your kernel distro yo have to recompiling the kernel again, so its a bad idea to use dmraid in production servers, i recomend a hardware raid or nothing, because its really that linux software raid works ok, but sometimes no, or yo get a data corrution, etc.. , so if y want to setup a raid buy a hardware raid or not use raid and use a good system of backup.
bye
lucho from argentina

Greetings!

I'm having the same problem with the Intel D945GNT Motherboard

Linux recognizes the discs but separatly, not the RAID VOLUMES. It even installs but when rebooting, as there is no master boot writen, the bios stalls, waiting for a boot device. If I deactivate RAID in the BIOS, everything is OK. Regarding this, there is an important issue. As I deactivated the RAID in the BIOS, kudzu (I think that's the name of the hardware manager), detected that difference and asked if I wanted to remove the raid controller driver (it even mencioned ICH7).


I'm kind of lost here... CENTOS does or does not support ICH7 with RAID?


Any hints can be TESTED ASAP on a pre-prodution server. I'm installing it to go production.

I was installing CENTOS 4.2. Tested 4.2 64 bit and 32 bits. Also tested 32 bit, server CD.



Tested 4.1 also.


Regards
Daniel Santos
Portugal

After much searching and testing, I found that this combination will not work and probably isn't recommended anyway.

I eventually purchased an Intel SRCS16 SATA RAID controller and things are running perfectly. In all honesty, as long as you provide a service to customers and they rely on your server, I would recommend a hardware based RAID card. The cost will off-set possible complications and allow quick turn-around on drive failuers.

Seriously, don't waste anymore time. Buy a decent RAID controller and, again, use this really useful resource to decide on a compatible card: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Harpon... you're the man :)

Before your post I've already order a RAID SATA card, from Adaptec. Didn't find any from INTEL at my supplier.


50 USD are very reasonable considering:
- The LOTS of time spent trying to configure ICH7R in Linux with no success (very frustrating for someone that is always defending Linux for Servers)
- Intel ICH7R RAID is not really hardware RAID but BIOS RAID that is a kind of Software Raid anyway. A dedicated hardware SATA card does the job really better


I'm expecting the card today or tomorrow and then I'll post again with, I hope, some sucess. Adaptec supports this card to Linux. By the way, the card is Adaptec 1210SA


Regards
Daniel

Daniel, be advised that this card is also in fact a 'fakeraid'

Adaptec AAR 1200, 1210, 1210SA, 1205SA series PCI cards — fakeraid. This turns out to be a SiIicon Image 3112-variant or 3112A-variant. Works with a patched version of libata's sata_sil subdriver (2003-12)

You may get this working, but because it has no proper / dedicated XOR unit, when rebuilding the array your processor may well be doing most of the work. Many of these cards are aimed at the Windows crowd anyways.

Please do post your findings and let us know. I looked at this card too, but decided on the Intel due to the great price it was being offered for and the fact that I do now want to take chances with my clients data. It's not the fastest card around, but worked flawlessly from the get go.

Again, use the following resource to find out more about the various cards available : http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html - without this I would have still been scratching my head over this silly issue. If possible, stick to a proper, hardware accelerated RAID card. Also, if a card's price makes it seem too good to be true, it probably is.

centos 4.2 have dmraid 1.0rc1 (fakeraid), so i dont understand why dont work to do i raid, dmraid works with ich5-6-7, so, i think thats the problem is that the installer was not done with this goals, so its force you to do a custom install, and then mount the dmraid
saludos

You gotta compile a custom kernel. It is a limitation of Linux I believe. Boot drivers have to be a part of the kernel as opposed to Windoz which can run it as a seperate driver. Something like that. The problem is I don't know if there is an ICH7 SATA RAID driver for linux. To make things even more complicated, I believe it is dependent on the BIOS and not the hardware. Different BIOS's need different RAID drivers for fake raid. Some use an Adaptec implementation in the BIOS and some use other kinds ?? I'm still a bit fuzzy on this part. ICH7 is just the hardware layer and the driver needs to talk to the BIOS layer.

It's fake RAID anyways even if you do find a driver. Better off to get a true hardware raid card that has drivers already built into the kernel. 3WARE raid cards are all pretty much supported by most modern linux kernel versions I believe. They are quite reasonably priced too.